Friday the 13th
Horror / Crime
95 min.
1980

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Summer camp has never looked so sexy and slasher-ific. Camp Crystal Lake is always happy to welcome new counselors but seems to struggle to keep any for the entire summer. Filled to the brim with blood-soaked kills, Friday the 13th is notably more gore-filled than the last slasher we looked at, Halloween. With no killer in sight for a majority of the film, the terror of the unknown fuels the danger our camp counselors are facing. Even when we first lay eyes on the killer we do not even know what we have just seen.

Without ever truly seeing the killer in action, we are left to wonder and fear for what lurks outside of the camera’s view. The decision to avoid directly showing the killer is substituted by a recurring musical sting. This short auditory cue sets us up to expect our next victim’s passing, anxiously waiting for blood to spill. Mrs. Voorhees is not the villain we come to expect from this sub-genre of horror. She is physically unimpressive, unlike her son Jason or Michael Myers. However, she never poses less of a threat than the towering killers we see popularized in slashers.

Friday the 13th has become the prototype countless horror films have drawn inspiration from. Think about how many horror movies are set at a lakeside summer camp with counselors on the chopping block. Other tropes, like ‘the final girl’, are reinforced in this movie, but finds their origins in earlier horror. The film also comes from an era of horror that used the promise of nudity to attract viewers, the prospect of a horror movie being a roaring success for its own merits still seemingly a rarity. The relaxing of obscenity laws in American law (like in Miller v. California) can also be attributed to this early use of nudity in horror.

What do you think about our first slasher with gushing blood and gruesome kills? I hope it got you ready for next Slash Course, but sleep tight for now.